Milkweed Ladies (11 page)

When I got back to my hotel, there was
a message for me to call my Cousin Pearl. Cousin Pearl had been born in a mountain cabin, but now she was married to a rich lawyer with a big house in Huntington, and she had a daughter about my age, Cousin Ann. Cousin Pearl wanted me for dinner that evening, and as we sat at her fine table talking about our kinfolks, I mentioned my date with Mr. Untermeyer. Cousin Pearl and Cousin Ann rushed me upstairs to Ann's closet, dressed me in flowing white satin, a velvet cape of purest turquoise, turquoise earrings and slippers, powdered me and painted me, and thrust a gold mesh evening purse into my hand. They put me into a taxi, and I rode through the streets of Huntington in a misty turquoise dream.

Though I could not dance, Mr. Untermeyer labored my big-boned peasant body carefully around the ballroom floor, and told me his joke about the three little donkeys: Don Quixote,
danke schön
, and the other “donkey” I can never remember. Now, I remember little really—only the golden music and pearly lights and what seemed to me the utter glamor, a million miles from my dusty schoolroom and feeding the cows off of the winter haystacks.

Then I was back in my room, my face misted in the mirror. I stood there a moment, and then took Cousin Ann's clothes
off, wrapped them up to return them, and after the next day's teachers' meetings, I took the Greenbrier train back to the Swago Farm.

I lived on the farm and taught school all that winter, and in the summer of 1937, I began my own journey over the mountain to Oxford, Ohio, to work on a master's degree. I requested that I be allowed to do my thesis in creative writing, a book of poems, and I gave my adviser, Walter Havighurst, an outline of a fictional mountain land called Gauley, its history from the pioneers to the lumberjacks and the new coal mines and macadam roads. That fall, I went back to teach the home school and wrote a hundred poems for a book called
Gauley Mountain.

In 1938, I went back for the second semester at Miami of Ohio and won the Atlantic Monthly Poetry Prize. The success, or maybe the exhaustion, must have gone to my head, because I did the most stupid of the three most stupid things I have done in my life: I married, and the marriage lasted three weeks. The divorce cost me thirty-five dollars, but it seems to me now a no-fault divorce, and one that left only temporary scars. We wished each other happy landing, and I went off to a dark, dazed winter at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. I
met Archibald MacLeish there that winter, and he took my
Gauley Mountain
manuscript off to New York where it was published by Harcourt Brace in 1939.

In the summer of 1938, at the Bread Loaf Writers' Workshop, I had met Roger Pease, a hard-headed, earth-loving Yankee schoolmaster, and we had quarreled in Robert Frost's poetry class. Roger and I were married in the summer of 1939 and we began our wandering through all the years of the Second World War.

I left the Swago Farm in the summer of 1939 and never went back again except as a visitor. Before I left, I dug up some iris roots over at the old house and took them with me. I planted them beside a red barn in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, where Roger and I went to live.

A
fter I left the farm, I often felt as I had
when I used to plumb the depth of water as a child. In summer, after every big rainstorm, a flood would come, and our tiny cow-spring trickle would become a roaring stream that flowed foamy and green over the leaning grasses. I would go out barefoot in the early morning with a long straight pole; and with my dress tied up above my knees I would wade along the shallows to measure the deep holes. I felt my way out into the current and walked slowly upstream, my feet and legs stinging with the cold. As I walked on and on up through the wild morning, I would become John Ridd of
Lorna Doone
with his trident, walking up the spate of Doone Valley. Then the mountains would come dark and close around me. I walked until I could feel the black danger and death in it. As I am walking still. For you walk to death, don't you? Because you cannot ride.

Aunt Malindy told me that old women
in the night can see; and now that I am old and often cannot sleep at night, I see pictures in the dark. I close my eyes and long-ago pictures float before me, all in color and shadow, framed in the soft fog of the years. Most often, I seem to be standing in our yard at home and looking in through the “big room” window, and we are all there together in the firelight. G.D., my brother Ward, Uncle Dock, and Cousin Rush are by the fireplace spitting and smoking and talking about Over the Mountain; and I am there myself, listening. Farther back from the fire, Mama is peeling apples; Granny Fanny is winding her hanks of wool, and her old gargoyle clock is ticking. Elizabeth is holding Little Jim on her lap, and Aunt Malindy sits in the rocker in her fat black sateen dress, her hands folded in perfect content. Up above us, the picture of Captain Jim hangs on the wall.

I can see all this before me in the night, and then it fades away and I see my brother Young Jim, now sixty-nine years old, still farming our land, sowing lime by helicopter over Bridger's Gap. Or I see Blix, Jim's and Annabelle's son; and then Blix's only son, Little Jamie, nine years old, who sometimes helps his grandfather turn out the coral rocks or wrestle big bales of hay up into the barn that was once our faded cottage. Sometimes
I see my hepatica rock, with the walking fern and maidenhair; or my white calf named Lily. Sometimes I can see Clarence Smith, our funeral director, looking down at G.D.'s grave and saying, “Many a lame dog did this man help over the stile.” Then, and quite suddenly, I may see a dying soldier in my picture; and there is blood and mud and death.

These days I see the war pictures more and more: the mixed up pictures from the Second World War, which was
my
war more than any of the others I have lived through. Often I see Howard Wilfong from my 1930 one-room school. Howard is in the control tower of his ship, the U.S.S. Bone, when suddenly a Jap kamikaze plane screams down and takes the tower. Old women in the night can see. Some nights I cannot sleep at all.

When I left the farm, it seemed that suddenly, or
almost
suddenly, I was out in the world. Roger and I were married and traveling the old trains hooting through the pass: the C. and O.'s Sportsman and Fast Flying Virginian; the Silver Rocket hurtling through the prairie night; the Southern through the piney woods of Georgia; the old sit-up-all-night Pacemaker roaring west to Chicago. All at once I was buying my
suits at Lord and Taylor's; and I, still in my Sears Roebuck shoes! On one of these wandering train rides, Roger and I and our baby, Doug, came one early September to visit with G.D. and Mama on the farm.

We were all sitting on the front porch that night: G.D. and Mama, Rog and I, my brother Jim, and our old collie herd dog lying at Jim's feet. We were sitting and talking, or not talking; and it was a still, crisp, fragrant night. The clover meadow was in new stubble, the wisteria shadows falling over the porch swing; and down under the wisteria, the crickets were crying their “six weeks till frost.” Then the collie got up, whining a little. He turned around backward and looked down at his bed. A strange pale light began moving in over the porch railing. Suddenly we all saw a faint glow quivering in the sky over Bridger's Gap: the Northern Lights!

We ran out into the yard and looked up over us. The whole round of the heavens was beginning to quiver with a wild, flickering crown. At first from the north; then the east and south and west joined; and the green-red-blue-gold-purple spear tent was streaming up to the point of the heavens and riving as it came: the great crown borealis of September 1941.

As I stood there, a kind of awe and fear
came to me, as though God had not yet unloosed His might. But He had it, held back somewhere in the banked fire of the Worlds. The borealis began to fade and die down, and we went back to the porch. The blue September fog spread across the meadows. We sat there in the quiet darkness, September 8,1941, just three months before Pearl Harbor.

Roger and I spent the years of the war teaching at the rich boys' prep school in Aiken, South Carolina. I planted my iris roots from the farm again, this time in front of a faculty cottage. Doug was a year old in October 1941 and just beginning to talk. One of his first words was “airplane,” for the bombers flew everyday over the school playing field in black formation. The war leaped and swirled around us in a kind of controlled madness; or it dragged on and on in an eternity of waiting, like water dripping from a roof edge.

Now the time is only a cry and a shuffle of mixed-up names: Bataan Death March, Burma Road, Java Sea; and the Lexington, FDR, Adolph Hitler, cattle cars, Guadalcanal, gas station, Savo Island, Iwo Jima, ration cards, Gabriel Heater, Betty Grable, Casablanca, Anzio Beach. The news came from home that Cousin Bill had gone with
Patton, and Cousin Buck went down over the English Channel. Double cousin J.B. was in the 82nd Airborne—Salerno, Normandy, wounded in the Battle of the Bulge. Then, after the war, “Red” Jeffries, from up the Crick, came home from Bataan and sat in J.B.'s filling station drinking pop. Finally we learned the date on which Howard Wilfong died: August 12, 1945—three days after peace was declared.

It's been more than forty years now since the night at the Commodore Hotel, but it still comes back to me out of the shadows and will not stop. It is still as clear as it was in its own stabbing hour. I forget where we had been or where we were going that hot August night, but Rog and Doug and I were getting off a train in Grand Central Station. Long, long before, there had been Old Tom's bison coming down to the salt lick in the twilight; and now I was taking a yellow taxi to the Commodore Hotel.

As soon as we were registered, Rog went off on some errand. I took Doug and an evening paper and went to our room. I gave Doug a quick bath and stuffed him into bed. Then, relaxing over a cigarette and a glass of water, I sat down to read the evening news. When I looked at the headlines, I saw a word, a phrase, that I had never
seen before. It was big and black, leaping out at me from the front page, and it was spelled A-T-O-M-I-C B-O-M-B

August 6 and 7,1945: the news story about a place called Hiroshima, a mushroom cloud uprisen, a triumph, burning flesh. I sat there staring down at the black newsprint, and something tore loose in my soul. Then, as from some far leafy distance, I saw Old Tom and George Rogers Clark wading the frozen swamps of the Wabash. So it was all for this? The blood on the snow at Valley Forge, on the sands of Guadalcanal? All for this that old Tim McCarty, because he knew “the hard price of Freedom,” gave his sons? “Daniel, Preston, Justin, James, Thomas.”

I got up and walked slowly over to the window where the lights of the neon towers were piercing across the north. Then it came to me, there above the roaring traffic and strange light of this strange city. It came to me, in the old superstitions of us mountain people, like a fireball in the night, a Death Omen. Aunt Malindy had seen hers in the sky over Buckley Mountain the night her brother Potts had been killed at Gettysburg; now mine over Hiroshima and over the Commodore Hotel. Only mine wasn't about Brother Potts. It was more about the human race, and more than that, about Earth itself.

That was the night the world changed. It wasn't joy that died, or faith, or resolution; for all these come back. It was something else, something deep and earth-given that died that night in the Commodore. Never again would I be able to say with such infinite certainty that the earth would always green in the springtime, and the purple hepaticas come to bloom on my woodland rock. For these, the earth and its seasons, had always been my certainty—going beyond death, beyond the death of all my people, even beyond the death of the farm; the sun in the morning, the darkness at night, the certain roll of the seasons, the “old blue misties” sweeping out of the north.